The establishment is very afraid of Donald Trump. Thomas Lifson is correct that it is outrageous for U.S. “Intelligence” officials to try to sabotage Trump’s campaign by saying they’re afraid to give him intelligence briefings. This would be despicable under any circumstances, but it’s especially grotesque considering that the only reason Hillary is not rotting in prison for treasonous high crimes and misdemeanors is because the President is protecting her (probably because she knows his secrets, just as he knows hers).

What’s really disgraceful about this already disgraceful spectacle is that these establishment types seem to have forgiven Hillary the whole Benghazi debacle, from the mismanagement before; to the vanishing act during, which almost certainly cost four lives; to the cover-up after. Others have not forgotten:

Ann Coulter takes on those accusing Trump of racism. Ann is in fine, sarcastic fettle as she flushes out the cowards (on the Right) and race hustlers (on the Left) who are attacking Trump:

I know it happened last week, but I’m still processing Obama’s visit to Hiroshima. There are three things I want to share with you, starting with the Leftist take and then leaving the gutter and heading for the high ground, where intelligence and morality live. The Leftist take revealed itself in a popular cartoon I found on my Facebook feed this morning. This cartoon, incidentally, boasted almost 8,000 shares when I grabbed it:

I’ll be away all day tomorrow, first doing an activity with the kids, and then listening to this year’s best a cappella groups (although this wonderful group from Israel won’t be there). I therefore hope that this post gives you lots of interesting stuff to read on Saturday.

Pro-Trump? Anti-Trump? Pro-GOP? Anti-GOP? Pro-Conservative? Anti-Conservative? Who the heck knows anymore? Trump’s ascendancy has caused normally staid, solid, and scholarly conservatives to become wildly partisan for or against Trump.

I was listening to someone explain a seizure yesterday, and he described it as all the neurons firing simultaneously and randomly. American conservatives are having a seizure.

Anyway, I thought I’d consolidate in one place some of the differing viewpoints about Trump and about how best to serve America over the long haul. As you know, my hot buttons are the Supreme Court; the Second Amendment; Israel’s security, because it’s the right thing to do and because Israel is the world’s “canary in a coal mine”; and naming and then fighting the evil that is fundamentalist, radical Islam. With those hot buttons front and center, I’ve switched from #NeverTrump, which was my position when the primaries were contested, to #NeverHillary.

My dream candidate is, and has been since 2013, Ted Cruz, but that dream is dashed. Here, in reality-land, I believe that the Republican party is dead whether or not Trump wins, and that conservativism needs to be re-taught to Americans from the ground up, just as they were taught Leftism from the ground up over the past 40 years, with the Leftist takeover of American education, news, and entertainment. If Hillary gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, destroy the Second Amendment, abandon Israel, and take policy advice from the Muslim Brotherhood figures who surround her (and even sleep with her for alleged health reasons) I think America will be too destroyed ever to rebuild.

I’ve assembled here a good collection of pro and con posts about Trump’s candidacy. I have no idea if reading all of them will clarify things for you or further confuse you, but they are all interesting:

If you haven’t read Jerome K. Jerome’s charming Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, first published in 1886, I recommend it. It is a pleasant antidote to today’s Sturm und Drang. But if you like to be mentally perturbed, you can’t do better than to read this post.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. During a Private Facebook discussion, a British graduate student quoted the Bible to support Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk. When this private discussion got publicized, the university decided it might have offended people, and immediately expelled him from its Master’s program:

Ngole’s future at the university was then subjected to the “Fitness to Practice” committee, which ruled that his conservative Christian beliefs about marriage would negatively impact his “ability to carry out a role as a social worker” and that his post “transgressed boundaries which are not deemed appropriate for someone entering the social work profession.”

The committee ruled that Ngole was to be “excluded from further study on a program leading to a professional qualification.” In late February, the school informed Ngole that he would no longer be recognized as a university student.

“Your student record will be terminated shortly and your library membership and university computer account withdrawn,” Ngole was told. “You may wish to contact your funding body for advice on your financial position.”

Ngole appealed the committee’s decision . . . and lost:

He was told by the university’s appeals office that his post was “inappropriate” and went against outlined conduct. The appeals committee determined that the expulsion was a “proportionate” punishment.

George Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945 and 1984 in 1948. He was prophetic, with 1984 becoming a reality only 32 years after he first predicted an all-controlling government.

Meanwhile, suffer the little children…. There’s not a speck of blood to be seen in this video, there are no bombs exploding, body parts flying, or knives flashing, yet it is one of the scariest videos I’ve ever watched:

My friend Scott, the same one who wrote this excellent time line and analysis about Hillary’s criminal malfeasance, continues to follow the Hillary saga closely. In a recent email to me, he wrote:

I can pretty much assure you, I and everyone else who ever held a security clearance and dealt extensively with classified documents did a spit take when we heard Hillary conducted all of her email as Sec. of State on a private address and server. That she would be involved with not just classified information, but the most classified secrets of our nation was inevitable.

I agree with Scott, and have only this to add: I think that the more that is revealed, the more it’s clear that she’s unfit to be president. It’s not just that she’s paranoid, arrogant, dishonest, spent too much time sending personal emails on the job, and didn’t give a hang about America’s national security. The underlying problem, one that should be apparent even to her fans, is that she’s dumb as a post. Can we really have someone this staggeringly stupid in the White House?

Oh, and Scott adds that Eugene Robinson unintentionally sums it all up for the left. “He bemoans her decisions, dispenses with her excuses as ridiculous, then says that she’ll be our next President, but we won’t love her quite as much as could have. And I love how he mentions having classified data on her server as a ‘technical violation of the law’ while still crediting the charge of ‘partisan witch hunt.'” Says Scott, “I so detest people who are not intellectually honest.”

I should be heading for bed, as it’s after midnight, but I’m so thrilled to have a moment to myself that I can’t resist a little blogging. I’m feeling especially smug (and tired) tonight because my heroic 1:30 a.m. efforts yesterday were the difference between success and ignominious failure on a big motion. Damn it all! I deserve some time to write.

Anything you can be I can be better….

My favorite military humorist, Lee Ho Fuk has taken the Rachel Dolezal mantra — “anything you can be I can be better” — to a whole new level:

I know this is going to surprise those of you used to my usual output of posts, but I’m suffering from writer’s block. The last few weeks have been so chaotic, my opportunities to write so random and infrequent, and the news of the world so overwhelming that, now that I finally have time to sit down and write, I’m frozen. After sitting her for a while, I decided that the best thing to do would be to clear my spindle. I know some of the contents are outdated, but they may still be of interest, and getting through the backlog may help spark my dormant (I hope, rather than extinct) yen to write.

Obama fiddles with Iran while the Middle East burns and Israel is forced to go it alone

All eyes may be on Obama and his desperation to get a deal with Iran (despite the fact that, in a sane world, the smaller, weaker, poorer Iran would be desperate to get a deal with Obama), but the fact is that the entire Middle East is a flaming disaster thanks to Obama’s habit of alternately meddling in and abandoning Middle Eastern affairs.

Bret Stephens explains that, thanks to Obama’s policies, it is now impossible for Israel to walk back the way in which he’s abandoned and isolated it:

Huffington Post leans Left. It is not a media outlet that believes that the only way to destroy the jihadist mindset is to wipe it out from top to bottom. Instead, HuffPo’s editorial policy makes clear that, in keeping with most major media outlets, it’s very certain that, somewhere out there, there’s a peaceful resolution to our problems with jihadist Islam — and one, moreover, that does not involve HuffPo writers getting shot or beheaded. The HuffPo collective believes this despite daily news reports demosntrating that the jihadis have world domination as their goal, and that they intend to achieve it through the purifying force of hundreds of millions of deaths.

Even Qatari-owned Al Jazeera is slightly further along the path of jihadist discovery than is the American media. It is Al Jazeera, after all, that took the time to interview Jurgen Todenhofer, a German journalist who managed to embed with ISIL and return alive. Todenhofer, as is true for so many European (and American) Leftists, seems to have gone in assuming that the bad press about ISIS, much of which ISIS promulgates itself, just couldn’t be true. Imagine his surprise to discover that ISIS is even worse than we imagined:

I was feeling a little puckish, so I posted on my “real me” Facebook the same video about the atom bomb that I posted at Bookworm Room yesterday. In brief, it argues that, contrary to Leftist propaganda after WWII, Truman did not drop the bomb, killing tens of thousands of Japanese just to impress Stalin. Instead, as contemporary documents prove, he dropped it to save lives: The Japanese were refusing to surrender even though they’d manifestly lost the war, and all credible estimates (as it turned out, estimates from the Japanese side too) were that millions of Japanese would die if the war came to the home island. Additionally, and of much greater importance to Truman in a war that the Japanese had foisted on America, up to a hundred thousand or more American troops would die too.

With those predictions facing him, Truman made the logical, and surprisingly humane, decision to end the war quickly with the bomb. No matter how deadly it was, it wasn’t as bad as the alternative. War is like that: you have to choose between bad and worse. You can’t vote “present,” since a failure to decide and act is often the worst course of all.

One of my Facebook friends couldn’t have disagreed more strongly with this historically accurate premise. You can only fully appreciate her comments if you know that (a) she was one of the smartest kids in my high school and junior high school; and (b) she is first-generation Chinese-American, so you’d think that she’d have the memory of the Rape of Nanking living somewhere in her brain. Instead, in the 40 years since I first met her, she’s become a victim of Leftist thinking. (Note: I’ve slightly altered some wording in this woman’s comments so as to protect her privacy. The fact that she’s become a Leftist mush-brain doesn’t mean that she gave permission to have herself publicly humiliated. All commenter’s names have been changed.)

Sally Fu: I found a poem “Museum of Doubt : Nagasaki photos” (graphic images not suitable for children), by Kathleen Flenniken, a civil engineer turned poet, who spoke at Seattle’s Hiroshima to Hope festival.

Sally Fu: Japan was about to surrender. Truman only bombed Japan to impress the Soviets. While the results were good for America, Taiwan became a police state under an American-supported dictator who killed of Taiwan’s intellectuals. The US also turned Asia into a source of cheap labor. [Bookworm here: Who knew in 1945 that Truman was prescient enough to envision Mao’s successful Communist takeover of China four years later, which saw the Nationalist Chinese government retreat to Taiwan?]

Danny Lemieux (yes, our own Danny: Sally, where did you read that Japan was about to surrender? I’ve looked at myriad sources about WWII, including Japanese sources. Everything I read said that the Japanese government had ordered every man, woman and child to defend “every blade of grass” to the last person. Indeed, Emperor Hirohito opposed the military junta’s demands when he finally agreed to surrender . . . and that was only after the Nagasaki bombing.

Sally Fu: Danny, it’s okay if you to want to believe in the moral high ground. The fact is, though, that America’s militarism (in fact, all militarism) serves all sorts of goals, including security and economic goals. Whatever journalists say, Asia, and especially Japan, has a long history of resisting colonial rule/interference, while the US and other Western nations have a long history of using the military towards global economic dominance.

Danny Lemieux: But Sally, I was looking for an answer to a specific question: You stated that “Japan was about to surrender.” What support do you have for that statement? Japan attacked America, America fought a war, and America won that war. It’s really not that complicated.

Sally Fu: Simple is good, and a simple story is necessary to defend not one but two actions of horrendous inhumanity in the eyes of the world public and to teach as history.

Another Conservative Voice: There is no evidence whatsoever that Japan was about to surrender. To the contrary: it was defiant even after the US dropped the first atomic bomb. As to “using the military towards global economic dominance,” it seems, Sally, that you’re very disconnected from Asian history. The only reason Asia hadn’t attempted to become an imperial power was because the Asians had fought amongst themselves for centuries, both between countries and within their own countries. Europe was able to engage in imperial growth, not only because the rule of law and relatively orderly governments were the norm, but also because Europe had, by historic standards, exceptionally long periods of peace and prosperity. It was these stretches of time that enabled the economic luxury of exploration and discovery, not to mention economic, military, and/or cultural imperialism. Although it was a painful process for Asia, Asia was ultimately fortunate that the West did influence it, since the alternative would have been continued inter-Asian warfare. India is the world’s largest democracy because of – not despite – western influence.

I haven’t yet weighed in. The short statements “Sally Fu” made are so rich in errors that I haven’t yet decided how to go about introducing new ideas in her mind. Her soil may have been killed off by years of Leftist influence, but that once incredibly bright brain may just be lying fallow, and new ideas, introduced correctly, may eventually take root.

UPDATE: Tom Elia has also been struggling through conversations with liberals. He has a wonderful line of thinking that sustains him during those moments.

I happen to know for a fact that the Mellow Jihadi is a tall man who is in good shape and exercises regularly — all of which means that he needs a certain minimum number of calories in order to be satisfied and nourished. Keep that in mind as you read about his delightful visit to the “Ducky Duck” restaurant in Japan, where he is currently stationed.

(I find that I’m too thrifty not to get the most mileage out of my writing. People who get my newsletter — and if you don’t, you can fill out the subscription form to the right — will have seen this post already, but I couldn’t resist a slightly wider audience for it.)

I wrote the other day about the extraordinary violence in England, a level of violence that increased dramatically after the Labour Party outlawed almost all guns. After reading that post, a friend send me a link to an article by Tom Gresham, writing at the Tactical Wire. Gresham’s article bounces off of Bob Costas’ inane little homily asserting that Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive if guns were outlawed. After pointing out the most obvious fact, which is that Belcher could easily have killed Perkins with his bare hands, Gresham gets to the heart of the matter, which is the way the anti-gun Left abuses data.

Gresham first tackles Costa’s claim that, even if guns aren’t used to kill innocent bystanders, they drive suicide rates. Gresham has one word to demolish that argument: Japan. Japan’s laws almost completely prohibit guns. Nevertheless, says Gresham, “the suicide rate in Japan approaches (sometimes exceeds) twice that of the U.S. No guns in Japan, but twice the rate of suicides of the U.S., which has perhaps 300 million guns.”

Gresham also points to a stunning statistic about America, one I hadn’t known. In the 20 years since most states passed laws mandating issuance of concealed carry permits to qualified applicants,”the murder rate in the United States has fallen dramatically.”

We now have three interesting facts: (1) Mostly gun-less Japan has twice the suicide rate of America; (2) mostly gun-less Britain has almost five times as much violent crime as armed America, a rate that increased dramatically when Britain banned most weapons; and (3) when American states enabled law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons, gun crime decreased, rather than increased.

We’ve talked before at the Bookworm Room about the fact that correlation is not the same as causation. Those three facts taken together, though, indicate that it’s reasonable to assume a connection between guns and violent crime. The connection, though, isn’t the one the Left wants us to draw, which is that guns increase the violent crime and suicide rate. Rather, the connection is that an armed society is one that sees fewer violent crimes and fewer suicides.

Our family has traveled a great deal, but I think few trips have affected us as much as the Japan trip we took this summer. Two things account for that: First, we took a comprehensive tour, so we saw more than we usually see on a trip. Second, Japan is so very different from America. Our European and even our Mexican trip have been to familiar cultures. Japan, however, even though it has a Western gloss, was a radically different culture from any we’d previously experienced. It’s therefore not surprising that the trip lingers on in our memories.

One of the downsides of the trip is that the kids are currently refusing to eat any Japanese food. They’ve always been fairly adventurous eaters, and they liked a lot of the food we had in Japan, but it got to be too much for them. In the months since our return, every suggestion that we enjoy some Japanese food for dinner (sushi, for example, as I have a gift card to this nice place) has been met with a resounding “No.” I got one of those loud “Nos” just yesterday, when I was trying to avoid cooking dinner, so the subject is on my mind right now. I assume that one of these days the children’s overloaded circuits will reset, but until then, it seems that Japanese restaurants are no longer part of our dining-out repertoire.

Another thing the has stuck with all of us is how immaculately clean Japan was. Just yesterday, my son kept asking me to explain again why the Japanese have no garbage cans in public places (answer: to limit the risk of hidden bombs or toxins) and why, if they have no garbage cans, Japanese streets, train stations and subway stations are entirely free of litter (answer: the Japanese responded to the absent litter bins by carrying their own trash away). Both kids came way with a heightened sense of social responsibility after having seen Japanese civic honesty and cleanliness in action.

We are also contemplating bringing a little bit of Japan home. Our Japanese trip offered us some of the worst and some of the best toilet experiences we’ve ever had when traveling. The worst were the squat toilets in public places outside of Tokyo. We mastered them, but not happily. Moreover, I kept wondering how in the world arthritic people manage to deal with them. The best toilets, though, were the ones with the bidet seats (like these, at Bidetsplus.com). They’re such a marvelous hybrid of cleanliness and efficiency. Instead of trying to squeeze a stand-alone bidet into a small bathroom (and Lord knows, all the bathrooms were small), the Japanese turned every toilet into a bidet. I won’t gross you out with details of their wonder (but you can see product videos here, which are cool), but suffice to say that they are wonderful — and affordable, and easy to install. We’re thinking of giving these bidets as a gift to ourselves this holiday season. They’re affordable decadence.